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Abstract Concepts - Relation to Handedness
P Nandha Kumar
Electrical Engineering, Roll No 12460
([email protected])
Mentor : Amitabha Mukherjee
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
([email protected])
Abstract
Left-Handed or right Handed? Does this preference make an impact on the
way we think? By the body-specificity hypothesis, people who interact differently
with the world make different decisions based on their interaction.Abstract concepts
such as good or bad are mapped differently in the brain for each of us depending
upon our handedness. In the following experiments to prove the body-specificity
hypothesis, relation between handedness and the mental representation of abstract
concepts (e.g. intelligent, evil, happy, attractive) is studied. It is expected that right
handers will assign concepts with positive valence to the right and the opposite for
left handers. This will rebuke the theory that this association is linguistic as most
languages ascribe good to the right and bad to the left.
Introduction
It is now established that any decision made is not always rational. Human judgment and
thoughts are cognitively biased. According to theories of embodied cognition, thoughts
comprise mental simulations of bodily experiences. If this is true, it means that people
with different kinds of bodily interactions must interact differently.
There are many examples wherein body features change our mental representations of
concepts and objects. For example, if thinking about objects involves mentally simulating
their colors then mental representations of apples should be qualitatively different between
individuals with red– green color blindness and individuals with normal vision. If this
is true, then any action which is performed using a dominant hand will have different
representations in our brains (e.g, Throwing a ball, writing a letter, etc,.).
So how is this body-specificity related to the mental representation of more abstract
concepts,like goodness,badness, intelligent? Like many abstract concepts, these notions
carry either positive or negative emotional valence. Several lines of research have suggested important links between valence and perception and action in physical space.
In most of the languages, metaphorical expressions tend to associate positive and
negative valence with the top and bottom (respectively) of vertical space.This association is reasoned with the correlation between physical experiences and emotional states.
Another view of this association is due to correlation in linguistic experience.
Five experiments tested associations between valence and horizontal space in rightand left-handed individuals, to determine whether these mappings are universal or bodyspecific. If they are universal, either due to invariant properties of the human brain and
mind or to pervasive patterns in language and culture, then both right- and left-handers
should preferentially associate good with right and bad with left. Alternatively, if they
are body-specific, then right- and left-handers should show opposite patterns, each group
associating good things more strongly with their dominant side and bad things with their
non-dominant side.
Experiments
• Diagramming the Good and the Bad :- Subjects are required to perform a
diagram task, in which they draw one animal in each of two boxes located either
to the left and right of a cartoon figure (in the horizontal condition) or above and
below a cartoon figure (in the vertical condition).Instructions indicate that the cartoon likes certain animals and dislikes some animals.Participants were instructed
to draw a good animal in the box they thought best represented good things and a
bad animal in the box that best represented bad things.However, it was not stated
that a particular box corresponded to either good or bad.
Figure 1b
Figure 1a
• Body-Specific Judgments of Aliens’ Attributes :- Participants are instructed
to judge the character of a fribble by circling the appropriate one.The fribbles are
visually similar figures which are clearly distinguishable.The alien figures are obtained from www.tarrlab.org, created by Michael J. Tarr, Brown University Fribbles
were arranged in two columns, one on each side of a list of questions printed in a
center column. This arrangement placed the members of each Fribble pair on opposite sides of the page without calling attention to their spatial arrangement.
Figure 2
Methodology
Volunteers (men) of the age group 18-21 participated in the study. Participants were
required to fill out a questionnaire on paper. A sample of the questionnaire is shown
below. The total size of the sample was 40. Of the 40 test subjects, 6 were dominantly
left-handed and the rest were right-handed (there were no ambidextrous people). The
questionnaire took approximately 5 minutes to complete.Ocular dominance was tested
using Miles test.
Miles Test : The subject is requested to use their hands and make an opening though
which they will see a distant object with both their eyes open. One after the other, each
eye is closed using an opaque object in front of that eye. The subject will be able to see
the object only with their dominant eye open.
Figure 3. Miles test to check ocular dominance
Modifications
1. To make sure that the assignment of a particular side to positive valence was not
prejudiced by the type of figure on that side, the sides of the alien figures was flipped i.e.,
figure on the left was moved to the right and that on the right to the left.
2. For half of the participants, a test of handedness was done using the Edinburgh
questionnaire before the second task was performed
Results and Discussion
The following results are obtained .
Figure4: Results from Task 1,Lateral Specificty
Figure5 : Results of Task 1 , Vertical specificity
Figure 6 : Task II, Judgements on aliens' attributes
• Task 1 :- In the first task out of 33 right handers, 23 opted the right box to draw
the good animal. Among the left handers, 5 out of 7 chose the left box as the good
one.This works out to an average of 70% preference of the dominant hand side to
be associated with concepts of positive valence
• Task II :- In this task, for 33 right handers i.e, out of 132 cases, in 86 the fribble on
the right was assigned positive valence. The knowledge of the participant that he
is being tested related to handedness does not make any difference to the reading.
A similar observation is obtained for left handers
• There is no clear relation between ocular dominance and the association of abstract
concepts. The relation found in these experiments may be taken as statistical
deviations.
Conclusions and Future Work
Five experiments demonstrated associations between horizontal space and the mental representation of abstract concepts with positive and negative emotional valence. These associations differed between right- and left-handers. Right-handers
were more likely than left-handers to associate right with positive ideas and left
with negative ideas. Left-handers were more likely than right-handers to associate
left with positive ideas and right with negative ideas.By contrast, both left- and
right-handers showed the same preference to associate good things with up and bad
things with down. This pattern of results was predicted on the basis of the bodyspecificity hypothesis and demonstrates that people with different bodies (in this
case, right- and left-handers) form correspondingly different mental representations,
even in highly abstract conceptual domains.
The correlation is not found with ocular dominance.This may be explained by noting
that ocular dominance is not fixed for an individual and can change easily.
Future Work
More data has to be obtained to concretely establish the body-specificity hypothesis
. It can be argued that the usage of hands to draw may bias the preference of the
participant to the dominant hand. To check this issue, the participant may be made
to point out the appropriate option,
As the body hypothesis is tested for abstract concepts, it remains to be tested the
body-specific decisions in real life circumstances.For example, given the job of hiring
an executive, would a recruiter choose to hire the candidates arranged on the left
or right of a page.
References
– Daniel Casasanto “Embodiment of Abstract Concepts: Good and Bad in Right- and
Left-Handers”
– Handedness Shapes Children’s Abstract Concepts-Daniel Casasanto, Tania Henetz,
– Jacqueline A. de Nooijer, Tamara van Gog, Fred Paas and Rolf A. Zwaan “When
Left Is Not Right Handedness Effects on Learning Object-Manipulation Words Using
Pictures With Left- or Right-Handed First-Person Perspectives”
– The Edinburgh handedness Inventory- Oldfield, R.C. (1971). The assessment and
analysis of handedness: The Edinburgh inventory. Neuropsychologia, 9, 97-113
– Relationship between handedness and ocular dominance in healthy young adultsJagadamba Aswathappa*, Karthiyanee Kutty, Nachal Annamalai.
– Ahern, G. L., Schwartz, G. E. (1979). Differential lateralization for positive versus
negative emotion.
– Casasanto, D. (2008a, November). The body-specificity hypothesis. Paper presented
at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago
– Right Hand Left Hand, The origins of Asymmetry in brains, bodies, atoms and
cultures
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for their help and cooperation
– Prof. Amitabha Mukherjee for guiding me through the project
– Mr.Michael. J. Tarr for allowing free access to the alien figures.
– And finally the participants without whom the project could not have been
completed